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The Influence of Birds on Culture

Seri

It’s one of the great philosophical questions. And the answer, when glancing at the world’s many creation myths that prominently feature our winged neighbors, may seem every bit as confusing as . . . well, chicken scratch.

Birds as Land Creators

Long before modern science, all civilizations passed along stories that describe how the world as we know it came to be. Often these tales involve one or more supernatural beings who fashioned form out of primordial chaos. For instance, according to a Yoruba creation story, a deity descended from the heavens to establish land upon the great primeval sea. However, to accomplish this task, he brought several items along with him, including a five-toed chicken and a humongous bag of soil or sand. The legend then later attributes the chicken with scratching and spreading the dumped heaps of dirt into land (1). In this scenario (and in most order-from-chaos myths), the chicken presumably precedes the egg.

The Yoruba tale is somewhat atypical, though, for often in similar stories, a kind of waterfowl, such as a diver or loon, diligently collects mud from the bottom of an all-encompassing primordial sea and forms the land. The Seri attribute this act to a great pelican, “a mythical fowl of supernatural wisdom and melodious song” (2). For the Yocut, this bird was a duck who, after emerging to the water’s surface and dying, left the hawk and crow to position the fetched mud into place (3). Throughout history, many seafaring peoples have entertained comparable tales about how the land was brought forth from the ocean’s depths.

Scrambled Eggs

Other creation myths tell of a world that was born into existence rather than formed. Some stories recount how the entities of the universe resulted from the mating of two giant god-like figures. In such cases, the beings are occasionally dismembered and, from their parts springs life—so that the birth is rather a kind of rebirth. A frequent theme in many myths is that the birth of the universe as we know it resulted not from copulating deities—but from a giant egg.

A popular creation narrative, the cosmic egg from which the world hatches has several variations. A few of these relate to one type of fowl. In ancient Egypt, for example, a goose was said to have laid the great cosmic egg (4). This bird is also associated with the Hindu creator god, Brahma, who sprung from a golden egg (5). According to the Rig Veda and the Puranas of Hinduism, parts of the egg or Hiranyagarbha became aspects of the world, such as the sun, sky, and ocean (6).

The goose, though, is not the only bird to spawn a cosmic egg. Similar parallels exist involving other avian creatures. For instance, in a tale derived from classical mythology, the egg comes from the Greek goddess Eurynome while in the form of a dove (7). Also, the first Rune of the Finnish epic Kalevala describes how a duck lays its eggs on the lonely celestial “water-mother” Ilmatar (Luonnotar) (8, 9). As she “. . . moves her shoulders, / Shakes her members in succession, / Shakes the nest from its foundations, / And the eggs fall . . .”, so that the shell fragments, yolk, and other components are transformed into the sun, moon, clouds, etc. (10). In such instances, one could say that the egg—or rather the great egg—came before the chicken.

Unfortunately, there are no tales that I’m aware of about chickens producing eggs of the cosmic variety, but perhaps you may know of one. Please feel free to comment; I’d love to hear about other accounts. However, as to which came first, the chicken or the egg, we should probably let the scientists and philosophers settle that debate.